I wanna make a GPS Maze game, but with a twist.

I want to make one of those GPS maze games, where a maze appears on your phone and you walk around in real life to navigate the virtual maze â€“ but with a twist.

You see, all of these games I’ve seen before just take a maze and put it down wherever you happen to be at the moment, like this one:

I don’t mean to pick on this one especially (sorry!) but I think that’s a bit rubbish. For one, it doesn’t take account of any natural barriers or features that might make the maze more interesting. And it could be actively dangerous – any roads around?

So here’s the twist: I want people to be able to bring up a map and draw a maze on top of it, using their local knowledge of the area to incorporate natural features. On this website, there would be a everyone’s mazes with ratings and comments. You would be able to download a maze to your phone, and play!

It could be a great way to explore a new area, or see a familiar area in a different light. And it could be fun to draw mazes on areas you know, and set people puzzling.

I’ve just spent a day at the WhiskyWeb conference hackday, and managed to make a good start on this project. There’s a website where you can design your map and export the data (The maze traces are a bit hard to see at the moment – click for full version):

And a native Android app where a map centered on where you are shows you the maze (with only one wall around the hackday venue, this one is a bit of an easy maze):

I was sitting on this idea for a bit, but my experiences today again taught me the value of being open – from talking to people today I realised that one big and hard feature I thought was essential actually isn’t. (Thanks Kat!)

So this is clearly early days – and I have no idea when I’ll find time to work on it – but let’s see what happens. Check the app and website out on github but don’t expect much yet!